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  Wash 2 is fair agity getting with him by now, butting over to get the piles and stack them himself. And then, just when it’s coming on the busiest, the baldies start barging in with all their pots and pans, fat-fryer baskets, chopping boards, long metal trays lined with burnt knickers of egg. His heart is racing. He gets rushing about, losing his scourer, piles increasing all around him. He trips on a heap of pans by his feet and near goes on his neck. Bracing his hands on the sink, he takes a couple of deep breaths, the black guy glaring over at him. Get beasted in just. Get the piles down before the chef sees, finish this shift – then he can put down a marker, then he’ll know where he’s at. He leans toward the machine, ignoring Wash 2, pulls over an empty tray and gets loading.

  Toward the end of the service, as he’s thinking it’s started to quiet down, they begin coming with great long dishes and glass bowls in from the restaurant. He gets scraping them out, chucking leftover sausages and grapefruit segments into the bin, until one of the waiters starts going through him, saying he has to wait until they’ve cleared all the food themselves. It must get reused, he realizes. All of it, too, they clear the lot. Even the eggs, man, Christ.

  By the time it’s over he is pure wheezing, blowing for tugs. And that was breakfast – Christ knows what like the lunch service is, or dinner. Or if he has to work them all, either, that’s another thing he’s still in the dark about. Still but he got through it. His standards were up in the air quick enough, but he got through it – congealed crockery going straight in the tray and the scrub, stack of earlier turned into a dump, dump, dump. Fair unlikely that it was coming out the other side clean, but Wash 2 didn’t seem too bothered, he just wanted to keep it moving through, the piles kept down, the waiters shut up. To keep their faces away from the hatch.

  Wash 2 takes off his gloves and motions Mick to follow as he goes into the kitchen. The baldies are bent and kneeling, scrubbing inside the ovens. Wash 2 writes his hours on the board and hands him the pen when he’s done.

  ‘Dia, is it? Hello.’ He holds out his hand. ‘My name’s Mick.’

  It doesn’t feel quite the right thing, a handshake, but the guy takes it, with a small nod of the head. ‘Breakfast now,’ he says.

  Mick follows him into a bare, bright room with tables put together into two long rows. There is a queue of twenty or so staff getting food from a table in the middle. As soon as they go in he feels exposed, stood there in the bright room for everybody to look at. There is the noise of chairs scraping as people take their places and start eating. Dia is gone ahead into the queue, and Mick joins the end of it, one of the chefs getting in just before him. He stays close behind and shuffles forward. There is a great purple wart on the back of the guy’s neck, his skin raw and pink around it where it’s been catching his collar. Somebody behind him too now, he can hear him puffing his frustration at the queue. ‘Come on, come on.’ His eyes on Mick’s back, taking him in. Chefs pushing in further up the queue; nobody saying anything.

  Here are the eggs, then. By the time Mick gets to the table, eggs is mainly what’s left, plus a few sausages, beans, fruit salads. He doesn’t care. He just wants to get sat and get eaten, go back to his room.

  Dia is on a table of black men, four of them sat together in green overalls. Mick goes to the other row, sitting himself at one end where the seats all around are empty. Further down there is a group of women, all dark haired, foreign-looking. One of them keeks over at him at one point, and he realizes he must be sat where their pals are about to sit. He eats up his breakfast quickly and at random. No that it’s a meal you’d want to linger over. One sausage, a slice of bread, and a small clot of beans sharing juices with three pineapple slices. Nay wonder they’re all so miserable.

  Everyone’s in their own group – the baldies at one table, the waiters another, the receptionists – all of them keeping in with themselves. It’s like school. And it’s so quiet, that’s the strangest thing. Hardly anybody talking, just chowing their food down in silence, the only noise in the room the sound of knives and forks hitting plates. Most of them look foreign, maybe that’s part of it, the lack of mixing. Still but, who’s he to talk, the cloyed-up Scot there at the end of the row.

  He is finishing off when the head chef comes in and walks over to him. He stands stooping opposite him, his hands pressed on the table.

  ‘Go okay today?’

  ‘Fine, aye, once I’d got the hang of it.’

  Some of the women are looking over.

  ‘You need to get your speed up, that’s all.’ He stands straight, looking off toward the door, then back at Mick. ‘Next staff food is at five, and your late starts at half past, okay?’ He pats once on the table and walks away.

  He doesn’t go to the next staff food. He holes up in his room, laid on the bed in his pants and his socks, done in, drifting in and out of sleep through the afternoon.

  The late shift is longer, relentless, more types of crockery. At least but he is in the bare scuddy underneath the overalls, which is a pure blessed relief compared to earlier. And as well he manages to wrestle a few more words out of Dia, who is on with him again.

  ‘Where are ye from?’

  ‘Ghana.’

  He realizes it’s coming to a close when the waiters are only leaving tea and coffee cups, and these wee pots skinned with leftover mustard and ketchup.

  When the kitchen start bringing all their pots and pans through, Dia gives him a hand scrubbing them clean, and afterward shows him where the mop is to follow where he’s already swept. They are about done when one of the baldies comes through with a bottle of beer in his hand, sheer-legging over the wet floor to reach for his knife bag off one of the shelves. A beer. That would be pure fucking heaven right now. He doesn’t say anything to Dia though, and they finish up, draining the machine and bringing out the rubbish bags before they leave, away back to the staff quarters.

  He gets into his room and tummels onto the bed.

  Chapter 19

  The next day is much the same; and the next. His body is feeling like it’s took a kicking. By the time his day off comes, he’s that exhausted it is all he can do to get out of bed in time for staff food, and he spends most of the rest of it asleep.

  The rota is two shifts each day out of breakfast, lunch or dinner, and one day off a week. His mind is occupied, near enough, and then when he’s no working he’s too tired even to think. He gets kept on Wash 1 for the first week, either with Dia or with Eric. He doesn’t try getting any patter out of them so it’s aye quiet working, but no that it’s frosty or anything, it’s fine, it’s just work. They two have their own reasons they don’t yap on, the same as he does, and so they get on with it just, silently working as a team while the baldies flash in and out with hot pans and the waiters gurn through the hatch.

  The afternoons, which are only a couple of hours if he’s on a lunch, he rests up in his room, or he goes out the back fire exit to the terminal for a pint, or sometimes, if he can’t stomach the idea of returning for the lunatic buffet, a sandwich.

  The later staff food is harder going even than the breakfast. Usually there’s a tray of mince, without tatties, and a tray of carrot omelette, or onion omelette, or sausage omelette. Then it might be chips, which are away in a second, and hard, chewy rice that gets stuck between your teeth. He sits at the correct table now. Takes his place with his African co-workers and chows away silently next to them. He asks the other two their names. Obi and Vincent. They wear the same green overalls, but they work in a different kitchen, he doesn’t know where.

  One day after the breakfast shift, the head chef comes in the potwash to tell him he needs to go up and see the operations manager: she has to get his details on the system.

  He goes after staff food. Her office is on the same level as the kitchen, through a corridor with the same scuffed carpeting and bare walls as the rest of the staff side, but the occasional plastic plant and a wall clock with the hotel logo on it. A few shabby efforts at perking up the glo
om – it’s in fact no unlike the walk used to be up to Alan’s office – which maybe explains how his stomach is feeling right now. Away, it’s Mick! Good to see you. You’re a kitchen porter now, I hear. Good for you, that’s great.

  He’s about to chap the door, but he hears voices inside, what sounds like an argument, and he hangs back. Hard to make out what they’re saying, but it’s two women. Probably he should get leaving. But then there is movement inside, and he presses back against the wall as one of the housekeepers comes out, leaves the door open, and is away muttering down the corridor. The operations manager appears, sees him, scowls.

  ‘I’m here to fix out my details.’

  She turns away. ‘Wait.’

  The door shuts, and a few moments later she shouts him to come in.

  She gives him a sheet of paper to fill in and ignores him, busy writing quickly onto a pad. She’s rattled, clear enough. He can feel the movement in the desk as she writes. A great black printer between them with Post-it notes stuck on it: Tronc adjustments. Gerry, Plane Food, 4 p.m.

  Scottish, he puts on the form, and Mick; the rest he makes up. He’s filling this out on a need-to-know basis, is how it’s going to go, and there’s fine well certain things they don’t need to know. Provan, he calls himself, after Dave Provan who played for Rangers when he was a wean. As he passes the form to her, he says that he doesn’t have a bank account. She doesn’t try hiding the scunnered expression that comes on her face, but it seems at least she believes him. They’ll pay him in cash, she says, until he’s got one. An envelope job. Nay problem. Nay problem at all.

  When the first paypacket comes, handed to him by the head chef at the start of one dinner shift, he doesn’t have any pockets to put the envelope in, so he tucks it in the top of his pants. When he’s signed out and he gets back into his room to take a look, one side of the envelope is clabbered with sweat and it pulls apart easily. There is a wad of twenties. No a great lot of twenties, mind, for the hours he must have worked. He sticks it on the table, under the alarm clock. Next day off, he’ll go buy a mini television. Christ knows where but. It isn’t like there’s shops around; or pubs, minimarkets, offies. The area around the hotel is a demented wasteland of concrete and car parks, carriageways and flyovers. The only place to go is the terminal. From what he can tell, none of the workers much leave the building. They keep to their rooms, or they lounder about the basement amongst their own squad. Mostly, though, they work. There’s staff on twenty-four hours, and he’s got accustomed by now to the comings and the goings during the night: the banging of doors and shuffling in the corridor; the toilet flushing and the noise of the pipes in the walls as the different groups come on and off shift.

  Mainly it is KPs and housekeepers down there in the basement. The doormen as well, and the night porter, whose room is across the way from his and he hears getting in each morning just the back of six. Each squad is divided by continent, it seems, as if these are skills you’re born into, the cleaning of saucepans and toilets. The KPs, apart from himself, are African; the housekeepers, South American; most of the chefs and the receptionists, East Europes; and the waiters, fuck knows.

  That’s what Dia has told him. The KPs are pretty much the only ones that ever talk in English. And they understand better than he’d thought, the times that he’s had any conversation with them; which isn’t a great lot, to be honest. Eric is still quiet with him while they work, although he has noticed that he’s aye similar with the others when they’re together. Dia is a wee bit more talkative getting with him though, telling him sometimes which of the waiters and the chefs he dislikes the most.

  Outside of the potwash and the lunatic buffet, there aren’t many places to go: there is a small staff room, round the dogleg at the bottom of the corridor, with a table and a few chairs, a battered oven, a kettle and a toaster, but Mick never goes in there, so the only place he sees anybody is in the laundry room. He goes in one afternoon, with a carrier of socks and pants, and Dia is at one of the machines taking out his clothes. Before he gets leaving, Mick chins him to ask about their pay. Dia smiles.

  ‘It is not very much.’

  ‘Aye, I’ve noticed.’

  ‘You write down how many hours but it is always the same.’

  ‘They take some off for the accommodation, then? They must do, eh?’

  He grins. ‘Oh, yes. They do. And food. We stay in a fine hotel. See?’ He looks up and around at the drop ceiling. ‘You are not with the agency?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are lucky. You are an Englishman. I am with the agency.’

  ‘Careful, pal, I’m Scottish.’

  Dia laughs. ‘Yes, yes, sorry. Scottish. We are the same, then.’

  Mick smiles. ‘Aye, well, maybe.’

  The next time he is on with Dia, they speak some more. Dia asks him about Scotland and Mick begins telling him about the yards, what like it was working in them. He quietens up soon enough though. Dia is obviously interested, but he doesn’t press him. It’s surprising, in fact, how much he knows already. He knows all about the big boats that were made on the Clyde, which probably goes to bloody show what dark part some of these ships they made had to play in people like Dia’s history. Mick realizes he doesn’t know if Ghana has a coastline even. Pretty bloody ignorant, really, but he doesn’t ask. Dia tells him about his family. He has a wife and a baby, he says, at home in his country. He’s going back soon to work as an accountant. That’s what he studied, accountancy, christsake.

  He is getting on. He’s no maundering up in Glasgow with his head stuck to the freezer or rotting in the shed like a sack of potatoes; he is getting through the days and the already familiar pattern of work, sleep, work, sleep, work, day off, work. Over the next couple of weeks, he goes each few days into the terminal and gets a supply of four-packs for the bargain price of £6 each. One day off soon, he’ll get out and onto the subway, buy the mini television, allow himself to think about giving Robbie a call. Even to see outside of the airport, that would be something.

  He is dozing in his room one afternoon when he hears some kind of commotion down the corridor. He ignores it at first, but after a few minutes he gets up to have a hingie out the door at what’s going on. It is coming from round the dogleg. He walks down the way, and keeks inside the staff room as he goes past. All the housekeepers are in there, it looks like, and as well he notices Dia and Eric inamongst. The women are talking in Spanish, but maybe those two understand anyway; it wouldn’t come as a great surprise, in truth. He goes in the laundry for a moment, listening to the babble through the wall, then he leaves away back to his room.

  He wakes up, sweating. The jittery sensation of knowing he’s awake and the dream is by but the feeling of it staying with him. He sits up with the sheets resting damply on his stomach, the head muddled, the image still there. She is knelt down in front of him and he is looking at her from behind. A great dump of washing in front of her, and she is lifting a pair of overalls out of the pile. He closes his eyes and tries to keep the picture moving, to see the front of her, but his chest and then the whole of his body has started laddering, hardening. The yellow edge of light on top of the door and the dim shapes of the room coming into focus. Wardrobe. Table. Clothes left lying on the floor. He is in the hotel. A potwasher. On again the morning, a matter of hours just.

  He gets up and perches on the end of the bed but it’s impossible getting a hold on anything, it’s all birling about the brainbox. He stands up and moves toward the bundle of clothes by the table, picks up the overalls and gets them under his arm. He claws a fistful of coins from the wardrobe drawer and leaves the room into the ever-lit light of the corridor.

  His limbs are stiff as he walks and he’s not feeling totally in the present, no at all in fact – he feels half asleep, the dream still pulling, like drag chains, behind him.

  The laundry room is empty. He goes in and gets a punnet of powder from the dispenser, and puts the overalls into one of the washers. He sits on a chai
r and watches them spin and flump through the glass; shuts his eyes and tries to see her.

  The sound of a door opening and footsteps in the corridor. One of the housekeepers is at the doorway with her dressing gown wrapped about her, a pissed-off look on her face. She comes toward him and bends down, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘You should go to bed now, yes?’ she says with a small sad smile, then she is away.

  Chapter 20

  The butter bucket. Daft but you get fixed on it, studying how full it’s getting, sat there on the ledge where the waiters scrape the butter dishes into it; a measure of how busy the service is. And then you start guessing what level it’s going to get to, is it going to beat the record and all this. Daft. But it keeps the sanity. The busiest shifts, it’s best taking a deep breath and getting stuck in, no a word between the two of you, each in your own worlds, the machine booming, the baldies shouting through for pan collections, and the ping of microwaves in the kitchen going ten the dozen like a sweet shop after school closing.

  He gets put on Wash 2 now as well, which is pretty much the same story as Wash 1 except you get pish-wet through to boot. In the quieter moments, he talks to Dia, and a little bit to Eric now, who near knotted himself the morning he came in with his overalls a size snugger from drying them too quickly. ‘Staff food is good, hey?’ And he’d had a right chuckle at him. ‘Must be, aye.’

  One thing he’s noticed: the lull before service starts, the waiters come past the hatch with a tray of teas and coffees for the kitchen. It’s the same story with beers too, when the chefs go into the restaurant at the end of the night for a drink. There’s times when he’ll be pure murdering for a drink himself after a shift, but the other KPs don’t seem bothered. Maybe a religious thing. Or maybe because it’s normal just, it’s the way it goes and they accept it. One shift he asks Dia about it, how they never get brought a tea in. Dia laughs. He pats the top of the machine.